


That Flower

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, gamingmas, should i tag that?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-22
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-09-11 05:40:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8956651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: 'Phil sighed, “Dan.” He said his name like it was a poem, with cadence and rhythm, a flow of a single syllable.
Dan looked at him, saw his face for the first time since Phil had gone to bed that evening. “The flower might have fucked me up a little.”'





	

**Author's Note:**

> tbh i was a little drunk writing this so if it doesn't make sense its not my fault

They’d finished the Undertale video at like three in the morning. Phil hadn’t actually been sure what the specific time was, but it was late enough that his eyes were aching even without his contacts in and London was as quiet as it ever got, which honestly wasn’t all that quiet. He slumped back in his chair, careful of its still present wobble – he really should get that fixed, or get a new one, he’s going to properly fall off it one day – and let his eyes close. 

Dan, he knew without seeing, the sounds so familiar to him that he could visualize the scene with his eyes still closed, flicked things off, removed the SD card from the camera and set it all to export onto his mac. There’s a pause in the noise, Phil felt Dan’s eyes on him, and he blinked his own back open with a bit of a sigh. 

“I’ll edit,” Dan said, no longer looking at him. “You should go to sleep.”

Admittedly, Dan looked far more awake than Phil feet at that moment. He’d shifted onto a sleeping schedule that’s significantly later than Phil’s. But he’d also edited the last three episodes of gamingmas by himself and Phil felt bad – just a little – for not picking up the slack. 

“I can-“

Dan was already shaking his head though. “It’s alright.” His eyes were fond, his head tilted, and Phil was too tired to really protest when Dan looked so soft and lovely. 

“I’ll be down in like an hour.”

And with that Phil knew he had no further arguments. 

A few hours later Phil hadn’t yet to been able to slip into proper sleep. He’d been tossing and turning, slipping into that distorted sort of half sleep before being yanked back into the real world. The final fight visuals of the video mixed with his regular schedule of dreams and the conscious world until he could no longer tell what was real and what was not. It was not, altogether, a pleasant state to be in. This was why people say not to play video games before going to bed. 

When, finally, he yanked himself up into proper consciousness, sweat piling up at the back of his neck, he found that the clock had only moved forward an hour since he went downstairs and that Dan had yet to join him in bed. It’s not uncommon for them to sleep apart, they do still maintain separate bedrooms, not only for the sake of their viewers, so Phil really hadn’t thought that much of it. Dan probably hadn’t wanted to wake him by going into the room. Regardless, Phil wasn’t so keen on returning to the state of half dreams and slippery consciousness so he got out of bed to make himself a cup of tea, hopefully settle his mind enough to get to sleep properly. 

He noticed that the light upstairs was still on the moment he entered the hallway. A glance backwards told him that Dan wasn’t actually in his own room – the door was open; Dan can’t sleep with the door open – but rather still upstairs. He abandoned the notion of tea and climbed up the stairs, intent on seeing what Dan was still working at. 

He reached the top of the stairs to find Dan not at the desk, but rather sitting on the end of the futon, his back slumped and his legs sprawled out across the room, feet tangled in the wheels of their desk chairs. Phil leaned on the doorframe for a moment and stared. Dan’s gaze didn’t even flick to recognize Phil’s presence, his eyes were staring blankly, but not glazed over, at the wall above the monitor, his expression totally empty. Phil sighed quietly, not out of dissatisfaction or annoyance, but rather as a release of some quieter, contented part of his soul. 

He didn’t speak until he was sitting next to Dan, his legs tucked up underneath him, moving delicately on the still fractured piece of furniture. They never had gotten around to fixing that either, had just shoved a book – one of Dan’s old law text actually, which had quite miraculously survived both the move from Manchester and the intervening years - under the broken limb and called it good enough. 

“Hey.” He touched his shoulder gently to Dan’s trying to glean his attention, wondering if he was too far gone, too far into his own thoughts, to speak. A moment later Dan replied, his gaze still not quite in the present. 

“Hey.”

They sat quiet for a moment, the room hushed, the bustle of London still racing on beyond their walls. Phil watched the pattern of the screen saver move across the monitor in front of him. It’s one of the old ones, ones that are considered ‘vintage’ now but to Phil they’re just nostalgic. Pipes crisscrossed over the screen and Phil thought of when he first set it, how Dan had crowed about ‘aesthetics’ for a whole day but hadn’t actually changed it himself. 

“What are you thinking about?”

Dan took a breath, then another before replying, his hand waved in the air as he spoke, his eyes only glanced at Phil for a moment before they settled back onto the wall. “Do you regret becoming my friend?”

“What?” Phil had almost laughed. 

“In,” Dan took a breath that may as well have been a sigh, “like, 2009. Do you regret you know, tweeting me back, talking to me, inviting me up to Manchester?”

Phil was at a bit of a loss, he could usually follow Dan’s tangents better than this. The moments when his internal dialogue got too loud, too complicated, that he had to just sit and think for a while, maybe blunder out a sort of conversation to Phil. The moments he coined as an ‘existential crisis’. They didn’t happen so much anymore, and they didn’t bring him to laying face down on the floor, but Phil still sat beside him when he was ready to talk it out, just like he did for the past years in their current flat, and as he did in Manchester, speaking the same kinds of phrases that he would tell Dan over video chat all those years ago. 

“No, of course not.” Phil did laugh then, just softly. “You’re the best thing to ever happen to me.” He meant it, honestly and completely. Nothing of the last eight years would have meant anything without Dan there, by his side, achieving everything together. 

“Okay, but hear me out.” Dan’s hand flopped again, in the air, over their thighs. Phil knew Dan hadn’t really heard him. “If, like, we’re all trying to make the right decisions, you know, all the time, with the goal of setting our lives on the correct paths, but those paths can never actually be actualized, then what is it that humanity is striving for? Why are we even trying if it won’t even matter in the end?”

Phil sighed, “Dan.” He said his name like it was a poem, with cadence and rhythm, a flow of a single syllable.

Dan looked at him, saw his face for the first time since Phil had gone to bed that evening. “The flower might have fucked me up a little.”

Phil almost laughed, choked a little on a breath and smiled, overly fond of his lovely boyfriend with his lovely mind, sitting up all night thinking about the questions posed by a video game. “We have to try,” Phil said, bringing them back to the point, “otherwise we’re just like the flower. And we can’t just go through life assuming everything’s going to be bad because then nothing would ever be good. So even if things don’t go the way we want it’s not a failure because we tried, put our best into it, and that’s really the thing that’s properly worth it.”

Dan sighed and pushed his hands through his fringe, making it stick up off his head. “But the king still died, even though he wasn’t necessarily such a bad guy, and I bet that the flower didn’t actually learn anything and it will go back terrorizing people and-“

“Dan?” Phil interrupted quietly. 

Dan looked at him again. “Yeah?”

“What does this have to do with us becoming friends?” Phil had learned, over many similar evenings, that the quickest way out of one of Dan’s crisis’ is to get to the point that he doesn’t really want to talk about, but is actually the root of the problem. 

Dan sighed again, his gaze dropped down to his lap, inspecting the seamline of his jeans. “If we hadn’t become friends then we wouldn’t have become… this.” He waved his hand between them. 

“Boyfriends.” Phil filled in. Dan cringed, he always did at the word. Although Phil would admit too that it’s not the best descriptor for their relationship.

“Anyways, if we hadn’t started dating don’t you think you could be better off?”

Phil paused. “Without you?”

Dan nodded.

He tried to imagine it, everything that his life had been over the last near decade now, and couldn’t find a single thing that he could separate from Dan. “Why would you ever think that?”

Dan bit his lip. “It’s nothing.”

“No come on.” Phil shoved his shoulder lightly. “Tell me.”

Dan sighed, long and drawn out, then waited another moment before speaking. “Well we’re not where you want us to be are we?” 

Phil’s eyebrows shot up. “What would give you that impression?” He’d thought they were doing better than they ever have before. Sure, there were bumps, but there were bumps with every relationship. Dan didn’t look at him. Phil touched the inside of Dan’s elbow with two fingers. “I’m so happy right now Dan, really.”

Dan released a shuddering breath. “Yeah, but you’re going to be thirty next year Phil, thirty!” He said it like he would say that his new shirt was Yeezy, like Phil should already know without him having to say it. “Thirty! You should be getting married and buying a house outside London with a garden and maybe a dog and talking about having kids and we’re not even…”

“Out yet.”

“No.” Dan slumped back against the couch, digging further into the mushed cushions. 

“Love,” he started, his voice so soft. Dan didn’t look over. “Dan,” Phil said more emphatically. He took one of Dan’s hands off the futon and weaved their fingers together. They both stared at their hands, intertwined, pale against pale, it felt both familiar and foreign. Dan finally looked up. 

“I don’t care about the timing, I don’t care how old I am, I care about you. You’ll be ready to be out when you’re ready to be out, I’m happy as we are now.”

“But you’d be more happy if we were out.”

Phil shook his head. “Dan the only thing that matters to me is that we’re working on it, which we are, how long it takes isn’t important.”

“But-“

“Nope. No arguing, I’m right.”

Dan smiled, just a little, the corner of his mouth creeping upwards and his fingers tightened against Phil’s. With significantly less hesitation he said, “Alright.”

“Great,” Phil replied. “Now can we go to bed?”

Dan’s smile creeped a little wider. “Alright.”

They got up, bumping shoulders as they walked down the stairs, their hands still tied together. Warmth flowed through Phil even though the flat had grown cold hours ago and the weight of the day pressed him towards sleep.

“You know I still don’t understand how you got from the evil flower to us.”

Dan sighed, the smile still on his lips, “It was a long couple of hours.”

**Author's Note:**

> I made myself write in past tense (which i don't do often) so sorry if it feels weird. Let me know what you think!


End file.
